1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capture apparatus that is arranged to capture a digital color image.
2. Related Background Art
One of the contour correction methods of correcting the contour portion of a digital color image captured by an image capture apparatus such as a digital camera is a well-known contour correction method employing base clip processing (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-219206, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-219207). The Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-219206 proposes to decrease the base clip level in accordance with the frequency characteristic of an input signal. The Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-219207 proposes to decrease the base clip level in accordance with the signal level of an input signal.
However, the contour correction method as described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-219206 considers only the frequency characteristic in a certain direction for a band-pass filter extracting the frequency characteristic around a subject pixel, whereby the base clip level of the area where there is no small pattern but there is edge, might be lowered depending on the orientation of edge. In this case, noises increases around the edge, resulting in a drawback that the image quality of that part may be deteriorated.